Don't go away mad, just go away
One of the things that has bothered me since I moved to the High Country in 2005 is the way that so many
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other transplants come here and decide that things have to be changed to fit them.
It bothers me and it angers me a little bit, mostly because it generally turns out to be a haves versus have-nots deal.
It usually goes something like this: wealthy-transient comes here, buys land and builds a home that they may or may not live in more than four or five months a year and decide that everyone around them, regardless of how long their families have been here, has to bend to their will and change the way they live because they say so. When people don't bend, these individuals begin to harass their respective county leaders to side with them over the natives, with varying results.
Before getting lucky enough to be offered the chance to cover Ashe County, I primarily covered Avery and some Watauga County news (for another paper). What I saw when I was there was an awful lot of encroachment into the lives of people who were hardworking, honest and simple. All they want is to be left alone, but all they get is people and corporations from off mountain building eyesores on what they once cared for with love.
There are some prime examples of this across the High Country, but the one that comes to mind first and worst, to me, comes from a statement I heard during an economic development round-table in Avery County some time ago. A Newland town official said that the county had now become so over-developed with high dollar homes that almost no one who worked in the various businesses in the county could afford to live there anymore and that their workforce was coming from other counties and even across the border in Virginia. Also, that the blue collar people who were living there on old family land or who were lucky enough to buy the land before property values went through the roof were losing their land because the property taxes were rising too high for them to hold onto their land, because of all the multi-million dollar homes.
Oh yes, and then there is the giant eyesore coastal style condo building sitting on top of a mountain near Grandfather and Linville Ridge, which, by the way, gets too cold in the winter for humans to live in.
So far things like that have not happened in Ashe County, but it could and very easily. In my time here, I have seen a few smaller examples of this behavior.
First to leap to mind is the junkyard issue in the county. It needs to be noted that the junkyards have been greatly reduced by the county, but not done away with entirely. Junkyards are useful businesses on a lot of levels for a lot of people. If you are not one who uses a junkyard, I won't bother to try to explain them. People who use them know.
But there are certain people in this county who have moved here from elsewhere and now don't want these businesses to exist. Why? Because they are wealthy and used to getting their way, plain and simple.
I recently saw a man putting in a barbed-wire fence along the property line between his land and the land of a friend of mine, claiming that his livestock needed to get to a new water source. My friend accepted this as true, and did what he could to accommodate the workers. None of us thought anything about it until no additional work was done to clear a path for the animals to get to the water, and the finishing work on the fence was not completed.
It was simply a case of an off mountain resident who spends a few weeks up here off and on in the summer months, who wanted to prevent his neighbor from using ten feet of his gravel road to turn a vehicle around on. Why? Because he could.
The big WHYS that I have in all these examples are WHY, if you visited the High Country and supposedly fell in love with it, do you want to change it, WHY you want to be rude neighbors and WHY can't you leave things alone? Look, if you want things to be like where you came from, WHY not go back to where you came from?
I watched this type of stuff happen to my beloved West Virginia mountain communities. Now I see it happening here and it really ticks me off.
Mountain folks are welcoming and accepting for the most part and ask very little of new comers except to join our communities as part of them, not as saviors of we poor dumb hillbillies. We don't need saving or changing. We have lived like we do quite nicely for a very long time.
I would like to point out that many, many, many more people come here and assimilate into the culture than come here with change or super-development in mind. But like the old saying goes "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," and some wheels in this county are squeaking awful loud.
So I say to you on behalf of all of us, you are welcome to move here, you are welcome to become part of the fabric that makes the High Country so unique, but you are not welcome to try and change our ways of living, you are not welcome to cut down our mountains and you are not welcome to try and shove us out. If that is what you have in mind, we would just as soon you go back to your home and leave ours alone.
Now it looks like someone finally agrees with me and has said what I have tried to say only better. As one of those who got SHOVED out I personally think it's time we ride a few of these nosy whatevers out of town on a rail, with a dose of tar and feathers, and send them back to their Charlottes. They come and they could NOT for one single minute keep their noses out of anyone else's business so maybe someone could PUNCH them in that nose. That is exactly what I'd like to see happen to this MR. BLOHM and I guarantee you if it was my yard he kept sticking his nose in or my business that is exactly what he would get PUNCHED in it or worse. As I once said until it's you they are harassing you have no idea how it changes the way you look at things. It doesn't just make me a little angry, it makes me FURIOUS. Mr. Blohm isn't squeaking, he's crying like a two year old who can't get his way!hasEML = false;
Sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you!